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Reverse Hepatic Steatosis and Type 2 Diabetes Simultaneously

Article written and reviewed by Cyrus Khambatta, PhD and Robby Barbaro, MPH
Published April 9, 2019
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Podcast Transcript

Raj Bhatt: My doctor after looking at the results basically said, “Oh my God! What's going on? This is a miracle.” He's never seen anything like it, especially on a natural basis, and he wants to know more.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD: Welcome to the Mastering Diabetes Audio Experience, where we teach you how to sit in the driver's seat of your diabetes health for the rest of your life. We'll teach you how to reverse insulin resistance, achieve your ideal body weight, gain energy and get your best A1c following more than 85 years of evidence-based research in the Mastering Diabetes Program.

Robby Barbaro: Our program teaches you how to reverse prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, and how to simplify your life with type 1 diabetes by maximizing your insulin sensitivity, using food as medicine.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD: We're on a bold mission to reverse insulin resistance in 1 million people. We're glad to have you joining us.

Robby Barbaro: Welcome to the Mastering Diabetes Audio Experience, we have a very inspiring testimonial for you today. You're going to hear Raj story. How he reversed type 2 diabetes, reversed fatty liver disease, and really just transformed his life.

It's really, really powerful stuff, and I highly encourage you to take the time to go look at the blog post, or watch the YouTube video, so you can see the pictures. Just the change in his face alone is really dramatic, and it's really inspiring.

So, there'll be a link below this podcast episode, click that and you can go check it out. We also have some pictures there of him playing with his kids, which is really powerful, and food photos of what he actually eats. So definitely check that out.

Now I have two requests for you listening to this show. Number one, I hope you get inspired and you take action, and you start eating more low-fat, plant-based, whole-food meals. Start there, move your body, just start making some small changes.

That's number one. And number two, I hope that you can share this episode with anybody you know, who's living with fatty liver disease or type 2 diabetes, to share it with them.

And the reason that's number two is because when you share it with somebody, it's best if you are also a living, breathing example, then when you're delivering this message and saying, “Hey, check this out”, when it's coming from you, and you've had a great transformation yourself, and you're doing this, and you're seeing results, it's just going to be that much more impactful when you share these resources with them.

So that's my request for you today. I hope you guys take action and see similar results to what Raj has experienced, and spread this message to other people. All right, let's get into the show.

Raj Bhatt: I'm Canadian but I live in New York. I grew up a lifelong vegetarian for a cultural/religious reasons, and you would think, “Hey, being a vegetarian, that's healthy”, and in fact not all vegetarians, vegans are alike, as we know, you could be a bad vegan. And I've worked… I've dealt with weight issues up and down, you know. I've been extremely healthy, where I had a six pack, and I've gained weight in certain periods.

Where my kind of negative journey started was back in 2010. I'm a Wall Street guy, work some crazy hours, and it was really starting in 2010 when I was at probably the best of health I had been in. I just got into this spiral of trying to excel in life through a stronger career. It was really the beginning of my 30s.

Today, I'm 39. So I'm just kind of taking 10 years back, and it feels like I'd lost my 10 years, but during that 10 year period, I went from a way to 170 and ballooned to almost 250. That was the max.

And during that time it was a constant battle of… It almost became food addiction. So the excuse was, I was too busy for work, I've got a whole bunch of businesses, and I was just constantly focused on that, but you know, wasn't exercising and wasn't taking care of myself, but the excuse with work and trying to find success, or an inkling of success, where at the detriment of my health.

Being a vegetarian I have really focused on trying to eat healthy, but it was bad, as I mentioned, but food became my crutch to relieve stress, but it was making more stressed with bad eating habits, anyways.

So, that just ballooned. And I did have a family history of diabetes, in fact, I come from a South Asian subculture that's vegetarian, and very high incidence of diabetes, close to 70% of urban dwellers within the state of Bihar, in India, is diabetic.

I tried a vegan diet, juice fast, and nothing was really sticking. And I would say I pride myself in being able to do good research for a very long period of time, in fact, a lot of people came to me to get help, but I was following normal stuff that was showing up on Men's Health and various different articles.

So I was on top of all that, but the big thing that kept on popping up was low carbs, higher protein. And it worked for me in my 20s but for the last, probably 25 years, when my father and my grandmother were diagnosed with diabetes, the one common thing that's been told, here within the Indian community, whenever he talked to anyone it's forget potatoes, forget fruits, avoid sugar, avoid sweets, and you'll be healthy. And that just wasn't working, as we know.

So at the end of 2016 I was officially diagnosed with diabetes. Before that, I was actually diagnosed with fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is enlarged liver, and how that showed up was through elevated ALT levels or enzymes. I think I hit around 140, I forget the exact units, but it was definitely way out there, and kind of freaked my doctors out, and started looking into it definitely was fatty liver.

I was trying to lose weight, I was told basically cut out sugars, cut out carbs, you know, same type of diagnosis, but that wasn't really working. One of the key reasons why some of those diets weren't working was, it just wasn't satisfying to the body. I think the body… That when you have a satisfactory diet or intake, if your body's liking it, it's going to respond fairly quickly, and these weren't responding quickly. And I'm a momentum based type of guy, if I see a positive momentum, I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and keep going, with these things it just wasn't working.

There was an emotional toll as well. So at the age of 39, almost 39, I'm the proud father of two boys. And for the last 8 or 9 years, I just haven't been able to play with them. I was just emotionally not there, physically not there, and what I realized with… There's always a spark in people, at some point, you weigh your positives and your negatives, and the spark for me was when I overheard my younger son, talk to my older son, and they wanted to play basketball with me, but the younger son basically told my older son that, “Forget dad, he's lazy, he is overweight, and he just won't be able to play, and he never plays with us.”

And I overheard that and that was emotionally striking because I'm not even 40 yet. I know, physically things were getting worse, but I'm losing my family, that really hurt. But when I talked to my endocrinologist, she said, “There's no way. It's a lifelong disease. You just can't do it.”

And you know, I fought with her, we kind of sparred back and forth, this was about a year and a half ago, but she convinced me it's impossible, “Take Metformin, you can maybe make it better, you can make your A1c a little bit better through diet and control. But reversal is not even an issue.”

And then March 1st I joined Mastering Diabetes officially, followed the whole concept of low fat. In fact, a lot of my ballooning in a recent year was because of increasing olive oil thinking that's great. You know, also thinking about the keto diet and just dumping a lot of olive oil here and there. Eating a lot of cheese. And as soon as they got rid of that, within a week, my fasting blood sugars went from 150s into the hundreds.

Within two weeks, I was down. So I'm assuming I've got pretty strong C-Peptide levels and good beta cells, but the reverse was very, very quick. And basically since then, I’ve just been following this low-fat, whole-food, plant-based diet, really following the Mastering Diabetes principles and diabetic condition was reversing really quickly, enlarged liver, I mean, the enzyme levels were starting to fall, and the weight was coming off very quickly.

The first month I lost about 12 pounds. The second month it was another 10 pounds. So as I mentioned before, I'm a momentum based guy, and just… It worked.

So where I am today, it's been 7 months, I'm down almost 60 pounds, so I'm at 190 pounds versus 250 or 249. My fasting blood sugars on a daily basis are absolutely under 100, usually plus or minus a couple of points around 90.

So, weights down, my A1c just last month was 5.2%. So a drop from my highest at 7.4%. I'm off Metformin, not taking any pills. By the way, I had a stack of different pills out for an enlarged liver, I was told to take milk thistle, I was taking some diuretic pills, and for a year and a half, two years, nothing was working, even though I was religious in those herbal medicine. So clearly they didn't work.

ALT just recently with 16. Definitely with fatty liver, enlarged liver, diabetes, I had increasing cholesterol, so my cholesterol hit close to 200. I had increasing LDL, triglycerides, and all that has been largely reversed, and brought down quite a bit.

So, most recently, my total cholesterol is 149, so right underneath that 150 mark for long term health. HDL is 40, my LDL is 94, my triglycerides are a little bit high but it makes sense as you're losing weight, your body's removing all those fatty acids, so it's at 70. And everything else looks great.

My doctor after looking at the results basically said, “Oh my God! What's going on? This is a miracle.” He's never seen anything like it, especially on a natural basis, and he wants to know more.

When you're eating this way, and your cholesterol drops so quickly, your body's thanking you, and you have to listen up for that. And so those who are doubting that this method works, you know, let the numbers speak for itself.

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD: We hope you enjoyed this episode, and can apply some of these principles to your personal life. Now, we have an Online Group Coaching Program that has helped thousands of people living with all forms of diabetes, reverse insulin resistance, drop their A1c, lose weight, and gain tons of energy. And also reduce their need for oral medication and insulin using, their food as medicine.

We like to call ourselves the world's most robust, and ridiculously affordable, Online Coaching Program for people with diabetes. And we've helped people living with type 1 diabetes, type 1.5 diabetes, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes living all around the world.

Now we provide you with three tools that are specifically designed to put you in the driver's seat of your diabetes health. The first is an Online Course that gives you step by step instructions on how to change your diet. Starting with breakfast, then lunch, then dinner.

We teach you exactly which foods to increase, which foods to limit, and which foods to avoid entirely. The course is designed with you in mind. We provide you with relevant information, and we do our best to reduce overwhelm, because we know just how confusing the internet can be these days, when searching for simple ways to improve your blood glucose control.

The second tool is even better than the first. We provide you with access to our online community, with thousands of people that are going through this process with you. You'll be able to interact with our team of coaches, including Kylie Buckner, a Registered Nurse who is brilliant. She also happens to be my wife, and is one of the most kind and compassionate human beings that I've ever met. Adam Sud. He reversed type 2 diabetes. He lost more than 160 pounds and he de-addicted himself from both food and prescription medication at the same time.

You'll also get to interact with Mark Ramirez, who lost more than 50 pounds, reversed type 2 diabetes, and is a certified Food For Life Instructor, through the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. You'll also get the ability to interact with both Robby and myself in the online community. And we guarantee that we’ll answer your question within 24 hours to help you solve problems in real time.

The third tool is a twice monthly Q&A video conference, where you can ask our team of coaches any question that you have about your personal program, and meet others that are going through this process with you. Now, we're proud to say that our coaching program is very popular, and because of that, we've instituted a waiting list to join. The reason we created the waiting list in the first place is because we have more than 2000 active members in our program and want to provide excellent service to our existing members. You can still join the program, but in order to do so you have to put yourself on the waiting list and you'll be notified of when we open next. When we do, we'll send you a personal invitation to join.

To join the waiting list simply go to www.masteringdiabetes.org and click on Coaching in the navigation bar at the top of the screen, or click the link below in the show notes. We can't wait to help you transform your diabetes health from the inside out. We hope to see you on the inside.

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About the author 

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD and Robby Barbaro, MPH

Cyrus Khambatta, PhD, and Robby Barbaro, MPH are the coauthors of the New York Times bestselling book Mastering Diabetes: The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently in Type 1, Type 1.5, Type 2, Prediabetes, and Gestational Diabetes. They are the cofounders of Mastering Diabetes, a coaching platform that teaches people how to reverse insulin resistance via low-fat, plant-based, whole-food nutrition. Cyrus has been living with type 1 diabetes since 2002, and has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from UC Berkeley. Robby was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2000, and has been living a plant-based lifestyle since 2006. He worked at Forks Over Knives for 6 years, and earned a Master’s in Public Health in 2019.